What Facebook did to American Democracy
We look at the article What Facebook Did to American Democracy by Alexis Madrigal for this assignment. This article focused on comparing the differences between Facebook before and after the 2016 election, in which Donald J. Trump won and became the 45th president of the United States. Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms globally and is utilized by people all over the world. As Facebook is free-to-use by everyone, the company makes its money by selling ad space. Political parties like the Democrats and Republicans take advantage of this by purchasing ad space to promote their campaigns and candidates. In some cases, these ad spaces were used for “smear campaigns” against each other’s candidates.
On the Republican or right-wing side of Facebook, they were using ad spaces to discredit Hillary Clinton with the revelation of her private email server with over 33,000 emails, including classified documents that she had kept hidden. On the Democrat or left-wing side of Facebook, they were using ad space to discredit Donald Trump through his racist and sexist views and actions that had come to light. The Republican and Democratic parties were not the only ones attacking each other through Facebook ads. However, the Russians had also initiated disinformation campaigns using ad space on Facebook to discredit Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party and troll U.S. citizens with fake information (Madrigal, 2017).
In this Case Analysis, I will argue that Contractarianism shows us that the information warfare on Facebook is responsible for the result of the 2016 election. Contractarianism is a moral theory that claims that morality is based on an unspoken social contract between all members of society as members of society.
Prier
This section of the case analysis looks at Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare by Lt. Col Jarred Prier. In this article, Prier spoke of three topics and how they were used in information warfare. The three topics in question are social networking, propaganda, and information sharing (Prier, n.d.).
The first concept is social networking, which focuses on connecting with others through social media platforms. Ever since the creation of the Internet, it has been easy to communicate with others worldwide. The rise of social media platforms has only made it easier for people to form connections. In life, generally, people network with each other, interacting with others to exchange information and develop social contracts. Social media has revolutionized that process by allowing people to connect with others worldwide, creating social contracts with each other in the process (Prier, n.d.).
The second core concept is propaganda, which uses social media to spread specific ideologies or beliefs. Propaganda is defined as messaging designed to influence behavior and utilized for centuries. Propaganda has only become more accessible as mass communication methods become commonplace. The utilization of propaganda is used every day by people, companies, and organizations worldwide to bring people to their cause or way of thinking. Propaganda can come in many different forms, including slogans, artwork, music, speeches, commercials, and in some extreme cases, the usage of fear (Prier, n.d.).
The third concept is information sharing and how having information trending on social media helps share and influence others. Since the emergence of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, they have given rise to creating a business model known as trends. Trends involve the usage of a topic to obtain public interest within a short period to contribute to a person, company, or organization’s agenda. Those that have control of the trends on their social media accounts follow four factors that benefit their brand: the trend involves a message fitting an existing narrative, the trend involves a group of followers to the message, the trend involves a team for spreading the message, and the trend involves a network of “bot” accounts (Prier, n.d.).
When looking at Facebook’s engagement in information warfare from a contractarianism perspective and Prier’s concepts, one could see that Facebook’s actions can be considered information warfare. Facebook had willingly sold ad space to both political parties of the presidential election and even foreign countries. They had sold ad space to Republicans and Democrats who used ads to promote their ideals and slander their competition, which seems standard in some elections. However, by letting Russians purchase ad space without checking the content of their ads, Facebook had violated its social contract with its users by letting them be victims of Russia’s disinformation, dissemination, and the variety of hoaxes that created mass hysteria throughout the U.S. (Prier, n.d.).
Scott
In this section of the case analysis, we look at A Second Amendment for Cyber? – Possession, Prohibition, and Personal Liberty for the Information Age by Keith Scott. In his paper, Scott’s main idea is questioning the idea of needing a second amendment for the cyber world. He follows this with some of the main concepts of his paper: the crisis of connectivity, the power and fragility of networked protest, and open-source warfare (Scott, 2022).
In the first concept, the crisis of connectivity, Scott had referenced John Perry Barlow and one of his quotes, “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” He explains how the non-physical domain is a reality yet is vastly different from what Barlow had foreseen. Scott comments about how the world is in a state of ubiquitous, always-on connectivity, which poses its problems. A statement that Keith Scott had made was, “From the standpoint of Information Warfare and ‘fake news, the open distribution of software which allows the editing of sound and video to in effect make anyone say and do anything to and with anyone means that politics, bullying, and cyberstalking are going to become even darker and crueler than the present.” (Scott, 2022).
For the second concept that Scott went over, he refers to Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufecki. Tufecki’s 2017 study analyzes how social media platforms have become a multiplier for protest movements and how technology has changed human interactions. Almost everyone has a smartphone or smart device, and they can broadcast their messages or spread the news of events almost instantaneously around the world using social media. Tufecki believes that this freedom is a double-edged sword, as everyone can have opinions that others may find objectionable or offensive. Social media allows people to extend their messages for their protests and gives power to those who voice bigotry and extremism, allowing dissemination, disinformation, and propaganda (Scott, 2022).
The third concept that Scott had written about open-source warfare, he references the model “Open-Source Warfare/OSW” by John Robb. Robb’s model was initially made through examinations of the beginning of the U.S.-Iraq conflict, and he believes that large numbers of small groups characterize OSW. He then compares these groups to software developers in the open-source community. Scott comments on how Robb had taken his model and applied it to the American political sphere, where online parties deploy social media to advance their aims. Robb then argues that there will come a time when a division of the online sphere will take place between three visions of governance. These three visions are the following: the insurgency “Strong” leader (Russian model), the #resistance… a sacred bureaucracy (Chinese model), and the corporations (neoliberalism). Robb believes that the Internet allows multiple ideologies to grow and spread that will inevitably conflict (Scott, 2022).
When looking at Facebook’s engagement in information warfare from a contractarianism perspective and Scott’s concepts, one could see that Facebook’s actions or inactions could be considered information warfare. With Facebook’s creation, it has opened new opportunities for people to connect with others around the world yet has also allowed opportunities for people to distribute “fake news.” Facebook’s reach has allowed people to communicate with others to raise attention to issues that can spark protests.
Conclusion
Facebook, now known as Meta, is a well-known company that provides a service in the form of a social media platform. A large and regularly used company should be better monitored against malicious intentions like Russia’s disinformation campaigns. While Facebook may not have purposely engaged in information warfare during the 2016 presidential election, its blatant disregard for its social contract to protect its users was a culminating factor in the informational warfare it performed during the election. Initially, Facebook could not be held accountable for the acts perpetrated by others, yet they are the ones who own the space they rent to others for ads. The company should have done better background checks on those they sell ad space to and the content of the ads they are trying to spread.
References
Madrigal, A. C. (2017, November 16). What Facebook did to American democracy. The Atlantic. Retrieved April 23, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/
Prier, J. (n.d.). Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare. www.airuniversity.af.edu. Retrieved April 23, 2022, from https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-11_Issue-4/Prier.pdf Scott, K. (2022). A Second Amendment for Cyber? – Possession, Prohibition and Personal Liberty for the Information Age. ODU VoiceThread, 1–11. https://doi.org/https://odu.voicethread.com/lti-student/1153396/?tok=26080557762643a644e99d1.65031079